reserves who don't think their oath is to the constitution but in fact to the bible organizations own website it's purpose is to quote glorify god by uniting christian officers for biblical fellowship and outreach equipping and encouraging them to minister effectively in the military society sounds innocuous enough but according to some in the military there's a brutal culture only in harassment for those who just aren't christian enough so here to discuss this unreported issue i'm joined now by our correspondent on a saucer churkin a thanks so much for researching those nastia what did you learn from your investigation about the prevalence of religious extremism in the military while abby one of the first things was certainly the fact that it's definitely something that's hugely under reported and not really talked about i mean we did see concerns about extremist christianity make headlines in the me to some of the outlets during the peaks of the iraq and afghan war but this topic has certainly kind of disappeared and been brushed aside and not discussed as opposed to you know

the role of islam like you just mentioned and as it turns out this issue is certainly still around and it's a very serious one because it's not only affecting as it turned out and we've discovered you know the enemy but it's also affecting our soldiers at home because of in some cases very severe pressure that is being imposed on them of being either of a different religion or not being christian enough like you said and another shocking thing to discover was that we were told that apparently this kind of understanding that extremist christianity exists in the u.s. military goes up quite high in the ranks and that people even addressing this issue with the high ranking officials are just basically told to stop talking about it or else and what sort of tangible facts does this type of religious expression have on both the military as a whole and the populations where soldiers are serving. well you know when it when it comes to wars abroad certainly the way this affects the situation is the.

there's much more aggression that needs to be on the ground i mean despite apart from the violence that actually goes on in any battlefields and another new level of of aggression resurfaces one it becomes about not just you know geopolitical ideas or whatever it is that you're fighting about but when it is one belief towards against another and several beliefs against each other and it becomes like you know the whole issue of religion that is supposed to be a personal peaceful kind of thing that a person has for themselves and up being a major issue that is becoming a new level in these wars that are being fought religiosity in part about your report was this one particular groups you know ninety six percent of people who said that they were persecuted for not being christian anough i mean what about those who don't identify with any religion do you find that they've been persecuted by more religious members of the armed forces. you know well you know we have to be clear that it's not ninety six percent of the u.s. military and ninety six percent ninety six percent of the people that come to them

but you're right i mean the question is what happened to those who don't believe in anything and in our report we haven't specifically talked to talk to people about the nonbelievers but just the fact that christians are being targeted for not being christian enough and you know being kind of brainwashed in a sense to be a lot more committed to god speaks for itself i mean if that's the issue with christians you can only imagine how much pressure people who are nonbelievers also experience. it is the army addressing this type of persecution and if so how. well abby these certainly are over the years several years ago there were attempts made to kind of said excuse me i don't know what's going on today. basically what was going on the military did sound so-called fix-it kids for example to into the military so that rifle for rifles for example and there were hundreds of thousands of them out in the battlefield that had biblical verse numbers on them be wiped out

but according to what we were told this is really not been a very efficient method because the fix it's essentially you know some of them we were told were basically quoits to kind of just rub on the rifle to get rid of the number are there not being used or not efficient enough or the number of rifles is so huge that it was you know just hard in the military had other priorities to take care of and this is just one aspect of this just the rifles when there's so much more out there i remember. people were kind of scared of former employees were saying you know he was carrying out a religious holy war i mean he honestly thought that he was carrying out some kind of end time revolutions and it scares me that people can be this extremist and actually you know in that mindset i mean how can the military really manage the balance between freedom and religion and intimidation of other soldiers and civilian populations. you know i think that is the most complicated question in all of this i mean because certainly religion is something that is so deeply rooted for people who are believers that it's very hard to understand how it is that on an

individual basis the military can target every single person for me an interesting point was one expert we spoke to told us that the reason this had reached such an extent really i mean and we have to understand that this is not you know prevalent in the military by any means but it's a serious concern and what he told us was that it's because a lot of the extremist believers were recruited during kind of the peaks of the iraq and afghan war because of these kind of mass recruiting process sees when people were just looking to get more people into. military and not really looking into who they were getting into their ranks that was part of the problem and so it seems like there's just many different levels that need to be addressed from an individual thing to kind of making the population learning more about what religion is really all about but also we were told that because some of the high ranking officials in the military do support this sort of extremism because it does make

soldiers fight harder according to what we were told they're not really looking to eradicate this issue as much as they're telling the people thanks so much for shining a light on this on a saucer target i appreciate it. i if you're a regular internet user you probably peruse a message board or comment section of a website and wonder why so many people write inflammatory horrible and downright insane diatribes after all in real life most people don't communicate with each other through racist homophobic and nasty insults so is it merely anonymity reading this type of vitriol on the internet or something else that played well thanks to a newly released edward snowden document by journalist glenn greenwald we now know some of these comments probably are coming from members of the general public at all an article titled how covert agents infiltrate the internet to manipulate deceive and destroy reputations remold outlines how intelligence agencies use

online troll tactics to influence real world outcomes the documents were obtained by greenwald from the u.k.'s n.s.a. counterpart g c h q in its secretive joint threat research intelligence group unit or j. trigg j. triggs mission is to destroy the reputation of specific targets by both releasing falls and damning information about them and manipulating cyber conversations to affect public perception and this program goes way beyond just posting nasty comments guys according to top secret slides which. were shared with intelligence agencies in the us australia canada and new zealand j trigger employees tactics such as honey trapping were online affairs are created for blackmail purposes changing the targets photos on social networking sites and writing blogs pretending to be a victim of the target and even emailing and texting incriminatory messages to the target's friends and colleagues but just stop at sabotaging specific individuals

online the unit also employs tactics for taking down and hire companies these tactics include leaking confidential business information to other corporations of the press posting negative information on online forums and getting involved in business deals to ruin relationships and just in case j. triggs agents are still confused about what their mission exactly is another site explicitly states that the whole purpose of the program is using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world all of this is summed up in the catchy slogan of the four d.'s denied disrupt degrade and to see how cute this type of behavior by intelligence agencies has been long suspected by some journalists and technophiles but as usual those concerns are generally dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense but in reality the signs were everywhere i was agreeable points out as far back as two thousand and eight cass sunstein obama's advisor and former head of the office of information and regulatory affairs proposing the us

government use independent advocates to quote cognitively infiltrate online groups websites and activist groups he even suggested agents go into chat rooms and social networks to spread false and destructive government conspiracies well just so happens the very same cast sunstein was recently appointed the white house's and it's a review panel you know the one proposed token n.s.a. reforms that were almost entirely ignored by obama not to mention that in two thousand and eleven the us military admitted to having developed software that allows one end of it. to control up to ten separate online personalities also called sock puppets going to come to these type of tactics other countries haven't even been secretive about their intentions to manipulate cyber information according to tronic and fatah excuse me in two thousand and twelve the national union of israelis studies partnered with israel's government to offer students two thousand dollars to spread state propaganda on online social websites like facebook

according to documents obtained by the website the program is an opportunity for israeli students to quote provide the hebrew word for state propaganda that is correct and balanced to help in the struggle against the deal of generalization of the state of israel and a hatred of jews in the world. yes because pain naive students to promote your official government message is a healthy part of any open society but i will admit that there is another side of the coin which i recently experienced first hand after talking about countries and corporate powers that profited from nazi germany in the holocaust their racist anti-semitic and neo nazi comments flooded my youtube and social media sites and uniform honestly making me wonder if the effort was part of a larger coronated campaign to discredit this show and unfortunately it's not just countries that are responsible for contributing to the growth of toxic online dialogue it's corporations too as revealed on breaking a set by investigative journalist or mel b p u's p.r.

firm ogilvy and mather to hire online trolls to attack and bully individuals who complain about the company's response of the deepwater horizon oil spill and we'd have to be naive to think that most multinational corporations aren't copying this exact technique of controlling their online image after all that's just twenty first century p.r. so for every machiavellian narcissist acting alone to dumb down and to store information you might as well hunker down in your troll cave and get on the government and corporate payroll. coming up i'll speak with someone who's identified these seven threats facing our democracy stick around.

transit road to vnukovo report you'll best way to the heart of moscow. the little rights. to the. paying of the young girls camel for the future hunger. between two and three hundred million guns the united states so you can act like they're not here and keep kids away from them. the plaza site is

a large you know i mean this teaches them a lot of for a responsibility to simply come to pay through the eyes of children if we can't do it for our children for future what is the country the same. as you don't know if you don't care chorused response to really. i don't know if everyone in my life that i cared about their government and then it became a skin well. i was a national champion in track and field and also was able to go and qualify for the olympic games. you know nine hundred eighty eight i started to experiment with that the drugs i had lost all the financial means that i. was really on the street.

black market can't. get a great. country. the . winter is when the sahara comes to life. laces palm trees are being harvested. people are waiting for the biggest event of the year. the desert festival. this is true it is very out of this race leading camel races have spent the last year preparing for the grueling marathon. the day before the race there's a heavy sandstone overcoming the power of nature is

a never ending challenge. on a desert winter. mountain talk about historical revisionism in the white washing of events in american history as attempts to hide society's ugly truths the narrative of america's story offered by the establishment is in many ways like scripture and that this narrative is not to be questioned but it's not just the past that is repeatedly distorted presently there are powerful interests that shield us from. seeing this country's current problems which brings me to my next guest has a name as jed mores the publisher of the long island process and the author of the book the great american disconnect seven fundamental threats to our democracy joins me now to break down what those threats are and maybe find out just how they can be overcome they give so much for coming on thanks for having me on the so your book

breaks down seven distinct threats to american democracy one of them is christian fundamentalism seeping into the public consciousness what danger does this pose. then you know that chapter really stemmed from jeff sharlet book the family which is i think one of the best books that has been written in modern times about both politics and religion and this sort of bizarre orthodoxy this very specific american christian fundamentalism that has crept into our politics as well there's one thing to have christian fundamentalism as a movement that has been on the sidelines throughout our history there's another thing to have it so influence our politics to such a dramatic degree and what he did was he was able to explore the intersection between wall street and k. street as well to be it because there was a fundamentalist group that was living in d.c. influencing the political sphere and how that sort of backed into our economy

as well which not a lot of people really think about but there's this again this bizarre orthodoxy that blends the economic side. of objectivism and philosophy with this idea of christ is capitalist and that if you have succeeded in this life you've already attained what christ had meant for you and and none of that makes any sense none of it we're able to roots of this idea that capitalism run you know runs core perfectly parallel to christianity. it's just make believe that that's the part that that is just so difficult to really understand i mean we see these policies playing out politically in uganda now how we're sort of exploiting this bizarre christian fundamentalists. my idea into the end anti-gay policies that we see in uganda these groups are very deep here but it's it's in it's in a political structure that is kind of unseen and so we have these prayer groups in washington for example that get together and they talk about how to influence

policy from a very spiritual place but in accordance to scripture but a scripture that says that again if you've made it here and you are the powerful and the leet then you have already been deigned as you know christ like that these ideas are rooted in a reality which is really when your influence in the political sphere that's a dangerous notion when you're kind of how these fantastical notions backing out what your what your push is politically i mean the second chapter in the book focuses on speculation has been another thread on talk about how you see market manipulation as undermining the democracy that's one of my favorite topics in speculation and deregulation really go hand in hand because you really can't have the rampant speculation that we have today inside the markets without this excessive deregulatory frenzy that we've had for the better part of four decades of speculation in the markets the best way to think about it is the end of this cycle which is in how we consume our products how are these products going to be priced

in the marketplace what is the price of gasoline one of the prices of milk on the shelves that's the net effect that we as consumers take in what's happening behind the scenes is monster manipulation on the scale that we've never seen before because we've had protections in place since the crash in the one nine hundred twenty s. these protections have been taken out they've been like threads on an overcoat that have been pulled out over decades to try and allow the banks to go in things like proprietary trading and manipulate the price of commodities derivatives even equities it's very very dangerous it is indeed i mean you are going to. difference for nine hundred twenty nine and today is that the american economic system isn't collapsing it's actually rotting from the inside out can you elaborate on that notion sure we didn't have the protections in place in one thousand twenty nine it today that we had in our in one thousand twenty nine that we have today we learned

from that collapse to have more of a keynesian model to take care of the social structures that to make sure that people didn't fall through the cracks and that's what really kept us in place through the various boom bust cycles we also had economic and financial policies that allowed us to mitigate those boom and bust cycles to make sure that they the depths weren't too low and the highs weren't too high but we've again we've pulled back so many of these these regulations that allowed this to hold in place that today we don't see inequality as we did then nobody storming big screen t.v.'s. looks just a little bit like a mercedes so i think everybody's ok when we know that inequality is one of the biggest things that we grapple with absolutely wealthy american disconnect also points to the version of civil liberties militarism the police state all of these things clearly there is a system failure here if you could point to one thing driving this downward spiral what would you say it is. i think. putting the book together allowed me to take some of these issues that i had looked at in isolation and thread them together

into a singular narrative which doesn't seem like it's that obvious when you look at how distinct some of these are when you look at militarization or speculation you wonder how can they be related putting it together made me realize there's so many of the same players behind the scenes that are pulling the strings there's so much so much of the same philosophy which is how do we hoard natural resources how do we cord economic and financial resources and just made out of nothing to make everybody feel like there's still liberty and so we have this we have this disconnect hence the name in that we think that liberty is being protected and we're in the land of the free even though we have the highest incarceration rate we have the. you know so-called free markets but there's no competitive spirit in the free markets anymore and so we tend to not have the full picture we misunderstand what's happened here deconstructing all these myths the glue that holds american society in place the grappling on to these is the last bastions of truth that aren't really true at all let's talk about solutions here we've got

a minute left but i mean how can we began to take you know former cohesive country again and prevent it from completely destabilize him in each of the chapters there's something that we can do whether it's regular regulatory fix but you know at the end i think occupy was was the best antidote that we had because occupy gave our generation a new language that we've lacked for so long and it was the language of dissent for so long we haven't questioned authority we haven't questioned the government shows like breaking the set you know what the interceptor is doing right now this is so important for us to capture that revolutionary spirit that we once had to be able to speak with the new language of met language is old its descent it is indeed it's right in front of our faces the answer it's the rising up it's always been in the streets jad morry thank you so much everyone check out great american disconnect pleasure to having you haven't you had so much.

twenty years ago the world lost an amazing person bill hicks was one of the greatest standup comedians of all time and one of most pressing social critics of our generation x. was a dark satirist who often criticized materialism and triviality and he spoke out about a whole host of political and social issues that still remain taboo in comedy circles today he died at the unforgivably young age of thirty two years old from pancreatic cancer but its spirit lives on and his words have never been more pointed and apt than today so he did a proper tribute to one of the greatest american social critics stand up can be. and hoser the moment of clarity web seriously camp what is it how are you doing. so we you know my favorite piece i think from bill hicks was his iraq war and of course you got the first iraq war iraq war back in the ninety's him talking about how it was never a war because a war is was made two armies fighting each other and i want to play you

a clip of just the best most pointed point from that clip. really armed and i wondered about this you know during the persian gulf war those intelligence reports would come out iraq incredible weapons and credible weapons how do you know that. well. the regime. if only you were alive to see the horrible failures of the two thousand and three and i remember watching that during the beginning of the second iraq war and being like it's an iraq war and it's bush and we have the receipts it's all over. how do you know it was amazing you know it was your favorite i guess hicks moment well i mean there's a lot i mean i always loved when he would go after marketing because that is not something you really see from a lot of comedians i mean or even you know people that speak in general in front of crowds and he would go you know he said marketers kill yourselves and he meant it

to. like the deleuze of law you read that we take in one thousand to three thousand ads a day or or banners or whatever and he had the guts to speak out against that and say look what's is doing to our brains and whenever you go after marketers i was like yeah that was one great thing i'm going confluent after advertising you made a tribute to hex where you interviewed his brother i mean how was it to talk to someone in his family so close to him yeah i did so i did a video yesterday for this twentieth anniversary and it i featured some of my interview with his brother and steve great guy who just wants to make it all about bill and it sounds like the family is just they really love how bills legend has grown and you know he said they never could have imagined that he would have grown to this legend status that he has but a really cool moment was when steve said that when people come up to him or his family and say he's like although bill hicks was very funny and they don't come up and go oh he was very funny i found

a very funny they say he changed my life and that's the deeper truth in bill hicks words is what changed people i mean he broke paradigms i mean he was cutting to the heart of so many issues that still are so pointed today i mean lee you're literally one of the only political comedians i mean of course there is you know louis. other people like that you are cutting to the core undermining the exact system that needs to be called out like hicks did i mean did he inspire you to take the route that you did in political comedy yeah he was an inspiration as were a lot of other great comics like george carlin and bruce even some people that didn't do comedy but you didn't do standup comedy but used comedy to make change like abbie hoffman so yeah bill hicks was a huge influence and seeing that someone could take these dark issues that needed to be talked about and make an audience laugh and enjoy themselves but still learn just learning that could be done was a huge inspiration i mean people need comedy people respond so much better to comedy than they were just like my newscast and that's why you're so great and what you do and why do you think more comedians are political considering the want to

completely have to up. i think there's two reasons one is that comedians like your average american a lot of them aren't political they just don't care they're not they don't understand they don't care to learn about it and i think and then the and then there's also a lot of them that understand it's a tougher route to go i mean you're going to alienate a certain percentage of the audience every time you go out there like i have to realize that ten to thirty percent of the audience is going to be forget you and so you have to accept that so it's easier route to not discuss that stuff luckily there are some comedians out there talking about it yeah i love when you've given the shows here in d.c. the audience is like wait you're talking about me oh no you're calling know who got everything that i yeah but the great that's you know that's what you're saying a moment ago the great thing about comedy is that a lot of people even though you are hitting to the heart of things they believe or didn't realize they believed they still will sit there and enjoy themselves and

leave with something deeper exactly thank you so much. for remember and appreciate and that's our show you guys join me again when i break this all over again tomorrow. i marinate joining me. for in-depth impartial and financial reporting commentary can from news and much much. only on bombast and.

dramas the truth be ignored. stories others refuse to notice. the faces change the world writes never. so picture of today's. problems in from around the globe. look to. the. and i think the trick. for. the.

ukraine's ousted president dismisses the country's interim leadership as illegitimate and asks for protection from extremists. the prime minister of ukraine solvent republic of crimea resigns and pro russian activists occupy a parliament building there thousands of supporters outside protesting against the rise of ultra nationalists in kiev. also the amnesty international accuses israel of using excessive force against palestinian protesters in the occupied land saying some killings could be tantamount to war crimes.